FOURTEEN
Egypt stank. The Nile, drawn back from its bounds in the dry season, leaves spread over the land a coating of grey mud. The peasants cover it with dung from their cattle, sheep and camels, and from its rich soil produce two crops of wheat a year. Yet it stinks.
And the stink of Egypt is moral too. Alexandria is a noble city, of Greek origin, as was of course the house of Ptolemy to which Cleopatra belonged, descended from one of Alexander's generals. Its harbours, guarded by the Pharos, an astonishing construction four hundred feet high, built in three diminishing tiers of limestone, pink marble and a purple granite from upper Egypt, are truly among the wonders of the world. The city has been laid out, in its public quarter, with elaborate care. Who can fail to be impressed by the great hundred-foot-wide street that runs right across it? Who likewise can fail to wonder at its university and libraries, the tombs of Alexander and the Ptolemies, or at its innumerable workshops where goldsmiths, scent-confectors, ivory-carvers, glass-makers abound, or the factories where papyrus is prepared. The wealth and variety of Egypt's economy must stagger every observer. And yet, as I say, the place stinks.
It is not merely the vulgar reek of humanity, in this city where half a million swelter in the late summer heat, a heterogeneous and excitable mass compounded of Greeks, Jews, and native Egyptians, quick to riot, cowardly and treacherous. Nevertheless their organization is merely a matter of efficient administration, such as we were soon able to provide. What disquiets in Egypt however is the undercurrent of malevolent magic, the strange and repellent cults of animal gods, the underlying assumption that truth is to be found in dark and secret places and not in the light. Beyond the city, in the desert, stand the vast and mysterious tombs of the ancient Pharaohs, monstrous reminders of a vile religion, the cult of the dead. Ancient Egypt is a land of buggery. It is said that the source of power is to be found in the penetration of the anus, achieved to the accompaniment of magical incantations. One Pharaoh reputedly described Egypt as 'looking like the crack between the globes of the buttock'. The fertility of the Nile mud resembles excrement, and one of their most potent Gods, Khepera, is a dung beetle; he is Lord of the Land of the Dead.
How can any Roman fail to be disgusted by this antique superstition; how can he fail to despise the land that bred it?
Had Antony been subdued and subverted by Egypt's ancient magic? In a sense. Of course Cleopatra was not Egyptian but Greek, and since the Ptolemies practised marriage only within the family, she was free of any inherited Egyptian taint; yet, since few doubt that she employed sorcery on Antony, which destroyed his Roman virtue and rendered him her contemptible slave, it is reasonable to believe that Antony fell victim to the greedy and rapacious gods of Egypt.
He had withdrawn his army to the fringe of the desert. One day he resolved to make a last stand, the next to submit and throw himself on my mercy. His plight was indeed desperate. His legions in Cyrene had deserted him and attached themselves to my general Cornelius Gallus. It was reported that Cleopatra tried to rally him; she proposed wild chimerical plans: they would sail to Spain and seize the silver mines; they would turn their backs on Egypt and the Roman World, and head, like Alexander, for India, to carve out a new empire there. Antony heard her in silence. His eye dropped. His hand sought the wine-flask. He looked at Cleopatra with the bitter hatred of a man who gazes on the instrument of his destruction. He wrote to me: You have played the game and won. Antony is hardly Antony any more. The God Hercules who loved me now curls his lip in scorn to see how low I have fallen. Yet we have achieved much together, you and I; for the sake of our old love and friendship, for the sake of your sister Octavia, my one true wife, I crave clemency. You will understand how I am humbled to bring myself to ask this. Why, Caesar, should the Roman world still be split by turmoil? I still have legions devoted to my cause. I can still strike a fierce blow, and, rendered desperate by my condition, can promise you that such a blow will hurt. But I am weary of struggle. I am ready to desist. Grant me, Caesar, safe passage to my estates, and I shall drag out my last days in tranquillity, tending my vines and olive groves in the fertile plain and gentle hillsides of my beloved Bononia. Is this too much to ask? Should you grant me my request, I shall deliver the cursed Queen who has bewitched me to your hands. How could I answer so miserable a letter? It made me quiver with shame to read it, for I could not fail to read the bitter self-hatred and abandonment of virtue that informed it. I could not reply. I could not even show the letter to Agrippa. I publish it now merely for the record, that historians be not deceived.
I knew how low was the morale of Antony's legions, and sent my cavalry against them. Antony's heroes of so many encounters threw down their arms. 'Why die for nothing?' one centurion cried. 'Die for the General,' a staff- officer, bloodshot and distraught, cried out. The centurion looked him in the eye. 'The General is nothing', he said, and planted his sword-point deep in the sand.
Learning of this, Antony's last resolution failed him. He withdrew to his tent. What passed before his eyes at that moment? Did he see that morning when he stood with Caesar's bloodied toga in his hand, and harangued the people? Did he recall that morning on the island shrouded by river-mists when we met to re-order the world? Did he, I wonder, even envy Lepidus, whose insignificance had saved his life? But Antony could not be pictured living in dishonoured retirement. I could not have treated him as I treated Lepidus.
News was brought to him that Cleopatra had killed herself. At once he broke into a wail of lamentation in which mourning and reproach, love and hatred, were strangely mixed. When he had finished, and wept a little, he called for a cup of wine, drank it and composed himself to sleep. Towards evening he woke. The sun lay low across the desert. Antony stood in the doorway of his tent and looked at the world turning purple in the twilight. He called again for wine, but this time merely touched the rim of the cup with his lips. In the distance he could still hear the cries and moans of wounded men, but his camp, so diminished in size, so silent, with the silence of men waiting for fate, must have seemed a long way from the battlefields of Gaul, Spain or Armenia. The sands stretched out in all directions till they lost themselves in the evening mists.
He threw his head up, they say, called for his sword, told his bearers to hold it steady and launched himself against it.
Perhaps the man shrank from the task, or perhaps a last instinct held Antony back, for the sword did not pierce any vital organ, and, though he fell to the ground bleeding freely, he was not yet dead. He moaned with pain or disappointment, and begged his servant to deliver the final blow. But the man shrank again from doing so, and night closed about the bleeding general. In a little, when he had lost consciousness, they wrapped him in a blanket and carried him into his tent. Meanwhile, hearing the news, his soldiers drifted away, falling from the camp like autumn leaves.
Towards dawn Antony woke; his fearful servants approached and told him that the report received yesterday had been false. Cleopatra was not dead. She had instead taken refuge in the Royal Mausoleum, known sometimes simply as the Monument. He begged them to carry him there, and, very gently, with a devotion it touches me to recall, they lifted him on to a litter, and obeyed his last instructions.
They raised him to the Mausoleum. He was by now very weak and it is not known if he regained consciousness. He probably died in Cleopatra's arms, but it is not certain and the accounts are conflicting. One version has it that Cleopatra reviled him as the author of her ruin, and that the last words Antony heard were full of hatred and reproach; but this I do not believe. In her own way Cleopatra loved him and besides she had too fine a sense of the dramatic to let him die in such a manner.
Of course I mourned Antony when I heard of his death. How could I fail to? I have seen gladiators bedew the arena with their tears as they gazed on the comrade they had slain, and no gladiators have been joined as Antony and I were joined.
So died this most remarkable of men. Agrippa, with his characteristic generosity, observed that a rarer spirit never steered humanity. It is said Cleopatra swooned at the moment of his death, and I myself almost did so, having to seize Agrippa's arm to support myself against a moment of dizziness when the news was broken.
'I am both glad and sorry,' I managed to say. 'Glad for Antony's sake for life could have offered him nothing but sad decline, and glad too for Rome, since Antony's death brings this old barren division of the world to an end. I did not choose this war; he forced it on me, and has paid the price. How did he die?' 'Nobly, on his own sword, a Roman death…'
I nodded. 'It ought to make more noise,' I said. 'You would think the death of such a man would shake lions
